Mijal Bitton, "Julia Salazar’s Defenders Reveal The Limits Of Identity Politics"
David Shasha
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Julia Salazar, Jane Eisner Forward Racism, “Identity Politics,” and the Ashkenazified Sephardim
I have been avoiding the contentious political battle in the Jewish community involving two current Democratic candidates for public office in New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar:
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/julia-salazar-and-the-jews/2018/09/02/
Ocasio-Cortez is a Radical Leftist who ran on what is essentially a Democratic Socialist platform, a la Bernie Sanders:
After she won the Democratic primary, there has been a concerted effort by Republicans to trap her on the very volatile issue of Israel and Zionism, as we see in the FOX News post.
Can anyone say “Jeremy Corbyn”?
New York is Jewish territory and Israel often becomes a domestic policy issue for politicians in this city.
The Zionists have been hammering away at Ocasio-Cortez ever since she won the primary and she has had difficulty dealing with the attacks.
Then there is Julia Salazar who has claimed to be a Sephardic Jew after transitioning from a Conservative Christian identity with a strong Zionist component:
https://jewishweek.timesofisrael.com/albany-hopeful-julia-salazar-defends-jewish-identity/
Jane Eisner just published the following article by Mijal Bitton, a member of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community closely connected to the Ashkenazi Jewish institutional world, that complicates the matter even further:
The complete article follows this note.
I would like to juxtapose two paragraphs, one from the Bitton Forward article, the other from the Jewish Press hit piece.
First, The Jewish Press:
My problem with Salazar is not her semi-who-cares claims to Jewishness. I honestly have no reason to doubt that she has ancestry of Jewish heritage or that her interest in Judaism as an undergraduate at Columbia University was genuine. And I have no reason to doubt that she has a sense of “Jewishness” within her own heart. And, in truth, there are not very many of us who are qualified to draw the hard theological or ethnic distinctions, anyway.
The second is from The Forward:
Let me be clear: my critique of Salazar is not related to whether or not she is Jewish or why she wants to identify as a Jew. Salazar’s problem also does not lie with her political views, which are held by many Jews whose Judaism remains un-impugned.
There is clearly something bothering the Jews when it comes to Ocasio-Cortez and Salazar that they are not willing to fully disclose.
Now, Ocasio-Cortez is not Jewish and claims no affiliation in any way.
But Salazar has not only claimed a personal Jewish connection – which has been violently questioned – but has sought to present herself as Sephardic to boot.
Eisner first gave us a piece on the Salazar question by Ilan Stavans, a Latin American Ashkenazi who is often identified by unknowing readers as an actual Sephardi.
Bitton refers to his article in her confused discussion:
Besides the trite argument that “She’s being targeted because she’s anti-Israel,” there have been two primary arguments defending Salazar’s unconventional identification as a Jew. The first defends her on the grounds that she represents a hybrid identity distinctly Latin/Sephardi/non-white, and as such inaccessible and misunderstood by her white, Ashkenazi, American critics.
The second defends her on the grounds that Jewish identity like Salazar’s is malleable and does not fit into one mold.
Examples of these arguments take center stage in Ilan Stavans’ article in these pages, in which he engages in his own reifying of a monolithic Latin Jewish experience. In that context, he decries the “inquisition” against Salazar.
Those who defend Salazar based on her expressed identity as a Latina Jew of Color are engaging in a form of group identity politics in which certain experiences are only accessible to those born to those identities. This means that individuals should not express knowledge of an identity which is not theirs, especially if said identity is seen as having less power or privilege.
She seeks to dismantle Stavans’ contentions in the most haphazard and scattershot manner: by pompously questioning the value of “Identity Politics” and the “false” signals they present to the public, as she presents herself as the very thing that Salazar is claiming to be!
“Identity Politics” has itself become a racist dogwhistle in the institutional Jewish world; a sign that the hated minorities are fighting back against the White elites.
We have seen this in the current litigation initiated by Asian-Americans over Harvard’s admission policies based on Affirmative Action:
New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has made the connection between Trumpworld racism and the lawsuit in the context of Republican Conservative politics:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/01/opinion/asian-american-harvard-lawsuit.html
Indeed, the current attack on Affirmative Action connects the issue of “Identity Politics” and PC Multi-Culturalism back to the benighted Age of Reagan and the notorious Bakke case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regents_of_the_Univ._of_Cal._v._Bakke
Now, as then, we have seen reactionary elements in the Jewish community siding with the White racists, as in the following 2012 article from Commentary magazine, the proud home Jewish Neo-Conservatism:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/affirmative-action-and-the-mockery-of-jewish-tradition/
Another 2012 article, this one from Sheldon Adelson’s Israel Hayom, displays the continuing Jewish concern – and anxiety – over Affirmative Action and “quotas”:
http://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/jews-asians-and-affirmative-action/
But a recent article in Tablet magazine claims to track a volte-face in the Jewish institutional world since the Bakke mess:
We can see how “Identity Politics” and the interface with Affirmative Action has remained a critical issue in the institutional Jewish world.
While attacking “Identity Politics,” in her article Bitton ironically identifies herself as Sephardi, a Jew of “Color,” and a Latina immigrant:
If moved to respond, I explain that I am a Latina immigrant (I was born in Latin America) and Sephardi (confirmed by 23andMe) and that I sometimes identify as a Jew of Color, even though I’m still working out where I fit vis-a-vis an American discourse based on racialized identities that do not account for Middle Eastern Sephardi Jews.
For those who scroll all the way down to the bottom of the article, however, they will discover the important fact that Bitton is a Shalom Hartman Institute fellow, which is consistent with the Ashkenazified Modern Orthodox sector of the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community she is a part of.
I have discussed this sector numerous times:
The YU element has happily abdicated the values of the classical Sephardic tradition and Jewish Humanism.
One of its most famous representatives was Rabbi Ezra Labaton, who spearheaded the New Convivencia with the Ashkenazi Modern Orthodox community:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/labaton/davidshasha/ASZ9YE5oJSE/fCqSmRp4PN8J
My article on Labaton’s White Jewish bookshelf shows us how the process worked:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/Davidshasha/labaton/davidshasha/l3d_GiV9hx4/iodb-iEbBQAJ
Ms. Bitton’s father Yosef is a rabbi closely affiliated with the Labaton-inspired Sephardic Community Alliance (SCA), the flagship institution of the YU Syrian Jews, known for its militant Zionist bona fides, and its aggressive rejection of the classical Sephardic heritage which has been removed from all community pedagogy:
Here is a selection of Rabbi Bitton’s very aggressive articles on Zionism, Israel, and the Arab Question from his “Halakha of the Day” series:
https://halakhaoftheday.org/category/israel-today/
Perhaps even more to the point are his many capsule biographies of classic Sephardic Sages that function as a form of Ashkenazi Gedoilim tit-for-tat; you have yours, we have ours:
https://halakhaoftheday.org/category/sephardic-rabbis/
I have been reading Rabbi Bitton’s articles for many years, and it is quite clear that he is utterly beholden to the Ashkenazi Orthodox viewpoint and has no use for Sephardic Jewish Humanism.
The Bitton family Sephardic identity is all smoke and mirrors – and indicates to the careful reader that the proverbial apple never falls far from the proverbial tree.
To illustrate the point precisely, back in 2003 I was struggling to arrange a series of public classes for Rabbi Jose Faur in a Syrian Synagogue in Brooklyn, and Rabbi Bitton did his utmost to make sure that those classes never took place. He truly has no concern for the Sephardic tradition and is utterly committed to the Ashkenazi YU world of the SCA.
We must then contextualize Ms. Bitton’s work with the Shalom Hartman Institute as well as The Forward within the larger Ashkenazi institutional framework.
Her very smooth integration into the system indicates how she has become an acceptable “Sephardic” voice for the Ashkenazim. This means that she is not an aggressive critic of White Jewish Supremacy, but is quite comfortable working within the intellectual-conceptual parameters of the regnant system.
But her article indicates that she is not quite clear on what her identity means in the American Jewish, read: Ashkenazi, context:
I’m still working out where I fit vis-a-vis an American discourse based on racialized identities that do not account for Middle Eastern Sephardi Jews.
It is rather odd that she would be seeking to represent Sephardic Jews when she is still “working out” what that means, and where she “fits” into an Ashkenazi structure that has so warmly embraced her.
It is a very strange way of establishing basic principles.
But more than this, her bio tellingly indicates that she is working as a “Social Scientist of American Jews.”
She is currently a doctoral student in Education at NYU where she is applying the usual Eurocentric Sociological academic tools to a thesis dealing with the Brooklyn Syrian Jewish community:
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/ash/jewish/doctoral/students
That thesis will likely seek – as has been Eisner’s current wont – to stigmatize the community as “backward” and “reactionary”:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/2bKwG0vGpN4
It is equally likely to avoid dealing with the deleterious Ashkenazification process that has served to marginalize and erase the classical Sephardic tradition from our community.
We should also recall that NYU is one of the many American universities where Ashkenazim have removed Sephardic Studies from the Jewish Studies department, relegating us to Spanish Studies:
https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/faculty/sj-pearce.html
In my recent visit to the NYU campus bookstore I did my usual tour of the alphabetized coursebooks and could not find anything on the classical Sephardic heritage.
Indeed, this is the world we now live in, the world in which Ms. Bitton is so at home and where she does her work and collects her honoraria.
So, when dealing with the Salazar mess, she does not indicate for the reader what the actual Sephardic heritage is: What are the moral concepts and intellectual-literary values of our tradition, and how this can be situated in the current Trumpworld Alt-Right political morass and the scourge of White Jewish Supremacy that is so critical to the current electoral cycle.
More than this lacuna in the article, there is also the problem of Ashkenazi control over once-venerable Sephardic institutions like Congregation Shearith Israel and the American Sephardi Federation, imposing a Right Wing political agenda on our community which feeds into Sephardic Self-Hatred in the larger Ashkenazification process.
I have addressed the problem in my article “Who Speaks for the Arab Jews?”:
We have seen how the installation of Rabbi Meir Soloveichik into the SI pulpit has brought the reactionary values of The Tikvah Fund into our very midst:
Indeed, how do Sephardim deal with the many complications presented by White Jewish Supremacist racism?
Bitton is in a particularly bad position to make such assessments, given that her writing bears no substantive traces of the classical Sephardic tradition and its complex weltanschauung rooted in Convivencia values and Cosmopolitan cultural integration.
Being Sephardi in this context is a blank, static identity that should not be rigorously or critically questioned against the Ashkenazim who control all the Jewish institutions and who dole out salaried positions and research grants.
Rather than do battle against this Ashkenazi racism, Bitton capitulates to the terms of the debate as demanded by institutional leaders like Eisner.
This of course serves to neutralize any possible Sephardi critique of White Jewish Supremacy, as we continue to remain outside the Adult Jewish Table, limited to a circumscribed space where our intellectual heritage will remain dormant and not a factor in the serious Jewish discussions that take place on a daily basis.
Here we see an Ashkenazi media organ, The Forward, choosing who can speak for the Sephardim – Stavans, an Ashkenazi, and Bitton an Ashkenazified Sephardi – who both lack the existential and intellectual commitments to the actual tradition; a tradition that is under siege and can by no means be presented in a value-free, decontextualized matter of “pure” identity.
In fact, we do see a good deal of foot-shuffling in both the Bitton article as well as in The Jewish Press article, as the basic discomfort of Salazar’s presentation of identity is being duplicitously questioned because of political concerns, even as those concerns are sublimated as if they did not matter, or should not matter.
It is the way of Ashkenazi PILPUL: Say one thing and secretly mean another without actually saying it!
At the root of all the consternation is PC culture and how it fits into the current Jewish identity complex.
The White Jewish institutional world is made quite uncomfortable by an alternative politics that does not tow the official line on Israel and on the accepted orthodoxies of the Jewish community.
Questioning those orthodoxies would mean being ostracized and losing status – and financial security – in the tightly-controlled Jewish institutional world.
Ocasio-Cortez and Salazar are being singled out for opprobrium because they do not fit this pre-established ideological model which is served by Ashkenazi institutions like The Forward and Shalom Hartman Institute.
Lost in the welter of all this contentiousness is the actual public standing of the classical Sephardic tradition, and the continuing problem of identity and representation.
Here is a review of the matter that I presented back in 2013 that still speaks to the ongoing problems we face:
Bitton does not indicate to us how she has become part of the Ashkenazi institutional Jewish world; whether that is in the Shalom Hartman Institute or whether it is Jane Eisner’s Forward, a newspaper that continues to erase the Sephardic intellectual-literary heritage, as we have seen in the barrage of dubious articles by Sephardi-hater – and Eisner favorite – Alexander Beider:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!searchin/davidshasha/Beider/davidshasha/hpqrDjlHve8/pruGuk2ABgAJ
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/2bKwG0vGpN4
The Beider articles, pace Bitton’s ignorance of the classical Sephardic heritage, are specifically designed to denigrate Sephardim and to elevate the Ashkenazi tradition (it should be remembered that Beider has no expertise in Sephardic history and culture, but is a Yiddishist), thus allowing White Jewish Supremacy to thrive.
The first article discusses “proper” Hebrew pronunciation, and amazingly places the Ashkenazi at the same level as the Sephardi. It is a sharp reversal of the previous Ashkenazi respect for the authenticity and superiority of Sephardic culture and its Religious Humanism.
The second article deals with Italian Judaism, setting out the idea that Sephardi identity is just one of many in that culture, in spite of the fact that Sephardim and Sephardic culture were determinative in the development of that tradition.
I have presented the Jewish Humanism and Sephardic heritage of the Italian Jewish tradition in the following special newsletter:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/Davidshasha/yKfgWtvKclA
Beider’s basic intent is to diminish the place of the Sephardim and make it a negligible factor in the discussion, to muddy the waters when it comes to the internal ethno-cultural dynamics of Jewish history in a way that favors Ashkenazim.
What is thus most striking about Bitton’s article is the Social Science, read: Eurocentric, methodological framework that it deploys. Rather than seeking out the actual organic political and ideological categories of Sephardic thought as understood historically, she has chosen to utilize the language and conceptuality of the European Western tradition.
The use of such language is proof positive that there is no real attempt to examine and make use of the Sephardic heritage; instead all we get is a set of assumptions and theses that serve to reify the Ashkenazi weltanschauung and not make the White Jewish racists worry.
And this in turns serves to uphold White Jewish Supremacy, the very aim of Eisner and her Jewish institutional cohorts.
David Shasha
Julia Salazar’s Defenders Reveal The Limits Of Identity Politics
By: Mijal Bitton
I have gotten used to having people ask me where I am from. It’s a natural if micro-aggressive reaction to my accent, my olive-brown skin, and the surprising spelling of my first name.
If moved to respond, I explain that I am a Latina immigrant (I was born in Latin America) and Sephardi (confirmed by 23andMe) and that I sometimes identify as a Jew of Color, even though I’m still working out where I fit vis-a-vis an American discourse based on racialized identities that do not account for Middle Eastern Sephardi Jews.
I mention my multiple identities here because the current intellectual and political climate demands I do in order to have the legitimacy to comment on the Julia Salazar story.
Salazar is the 28-year-old democratic socialist candidate running for State Senate in New York’s 18th District. She has been the subject of recent news articles focused on her rapid transformation from a Christian-identifying, pro-Israel, and pro-life activist to a Jewish-identifying, BDS-supporting, far-left political candidate. Others found evidence disputing her claims to being an immigrant, and her claim that she comes from humble roots.
Most controversial were the reports that questioned Salazar’s most recent identification as a Sephardi/immigrant Jew, with investigative reporting (in Tablet and Haaretz) suggesting that Salazar has fabricated these affiliations for political expediency. Her father was not Jewish, as she previously claimed, and her identification as Jewish seems to be based on a combination of “family lore” and a two month conversion.
I am not actually interested in gatekeeping who is a Jew and who is not, as many have in the wake of these revelations. But I am interested in the competing notions of identity that lie at the heart of this saga. For the Salazar dustup revealed a fundamental and seldom explored paradox in the liberal discourse on identity: the tension between essential and exclusive identity politics predicated on group experiences on the one hand, and notions of identity that validate choice and malleability in how individuals self-identify on the other.
Salazar and her supporters’ response to her critics reveal the crux — and the dangers — of this paradox.
Besides the trite argument that “She’s being targeted because she’s anti-Israel,” there have been two primary arguments defending Salazar’s unconventional identification as a Jew. The first defends her on the grounds that she represents a hybrid identity distinctly Latin/Sephardi/non-white, and as such inaccessible and misunderstood by her white, Ashkenazi, American critics.
The second defends her on the grounds that Jewish identity like Salazar’s is malleable and does not fit into one mold.
Examples of these arguments take center stage in Ilan Stavans’ article in these pages, in which he engages in his own reifying of a monolithic Latin Jewish experience. In that context, he decries the “inquisition” against Salazar.
Those who defend Salazar based on her expressed identity as a Latina Jew of Color are engaging in a form of group identity politics in which certain experiences are only accessible to those born to those identities. This means that individuals should not express knowledge of an identity which is not theirs, especially if said identity is seen as having less power or privilege.
The intellectual assumption that gives birth to these conceptions of identity politics is simple: Being born into a certain gender/ethnic/national/racial group identity matters, and because these identities often bring them disempowerment, others should shy away from attempting to represent or investigate them.
The very real structural inequities that minority groups often face has translated in liberal discourse into a kind of discursive privilege of representation. This representational privilege in no way competes with the structural inequality they face. But it does mean that minority identity becomes something of a rarified property.
It is in this mode of thinking that Salazar’s identity as Latina, Sephardi, or as a Jew of Color, becomes protected property; it can only be understood, and interrogated, by the small number of those born into similar identities. And everyone else must protect this representational privilege.
There are several problems with the specific manifestation of this position in this case. Most significantly, it challenges another form of identity to which Salazar and her defenders have laid claim when describing her Jewish journey — that of identity-by-individual-choice.
In her response to critiques of her expressed Jewish identity, Salazar argues she has some Jewish lineage and that she chose to embrace it after the death of her father. This assumes that individuals are complex agents who can choose to adopt or privilege an identity when they want to.
This is why I am so troubled by Salazar and her defenders. They want to — selectively — have it both ways. According to them, Salazar’s minority group identity confers upon her certain inalienable rights of representation inaccessible to others, but she can also legitimately choose to be Jewish in her own individual way.
The implication underlying this contradiction disturbs me, particularly because it approaches Jewish identity differently than other minority ethnic and racial identities: One can choose to become Jewish and speak as a Jew, but one must not pretend to understand the experiences of someone born to Colombian parents. Judaism should be available to all for individual appropriation, while other minority ethnic/racial group identities should remain closed off, protected from outsiders.
The hierarchy underlying this distinction seems clear: Jewish identity has less value than other minority identities and Jews as a collective do not have the right as a group to own their own self-representation.
This contradiction does not just feel wrong. It smacks of dangerous political maneuvering that cheapens the ability of specifically Jewish collectives and communities to self-identify. It is a cultural appropriation of Jews cloaked in paradoxical discourses of identity-by-individual-choice and group identity politics.
Let me be clear: my critique of Salazar is not related to whether or not she is Jewish or why she wants to identify as a Jew. Salazar’s problem also does not lie with her political views, which are held by many Jews whose Judaism remains un-impugned.
Salazar’s wrongdoing lies in the contradiction of her approach to self-identification, which signals an attempt to capitalize on identity as cultural cachet, her disregard for the way most American Jews understand what it means to be Jewish, and her indignation in light of her Jewish critics, while insisting that they cannot understand her particular Jewish identity.
Salazar’s story demands that we explore the way in which we approach identity. Is it malleable, individual and pro-choice, or it is essential, exclusive and inherited?
And if it can be both, then those who choose a selective approach to identity must demonstrate moral consistency in their rhetoric.
Mijal Bitton is a Fellow in Residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and a Social Scientist of American Jews.
From The Forward, August 31, 2018